At the Stillpoint

New from Stillpoint Digital Press

About Us — The Human Face of Digital Publishing

When I started Stillpoint Digital Press last year, all that I intended to do was to take my own varied experience as a writer, an editor, and an ebook designer and offer a service that was both more professional and more personal than that offered by the ebook self-publishing "services": digital publishing with a human face.

From the beginning, that idea has resonated — and has brought me in directions that I never anticipated.

News from the Stillpoint

Kenneth Schneyer

We asked author Kenneth Schneyer to write a foreword to Heather Albano‘s forthcoming time-travel adventure novel Timepiece, which comes out January 3, 2017. What he wrote was so delightful, we thought we’d share it ahead of time!

Of course time travel represents an inversion of the way we experience the world. The arrow of entropy is reversed.People gain knowledge of the consequences of their actions before they take them.In this, it resembles both the prophecy story and the flashback: more than one author has imagined Tiresias and Cassandra as time travelers. Continue reading Kenneth Schneyer on Timepiece: Savor every bite→

Running until December 20, the Keeping Time Kickstarter campaign will underwrite the publication of new editions of the first two novels in the series, Timepieceand Timekeeper. Stillpoint plans to release these titles in 2017 in both ebook and print editions. In addition, January, 2018 will see the release of the previously unpublished conclusion of the series, Timebound.

Rewards for backing the campaign range from copies of the ebooks to copies of the paperback edition or the Kickstarter-exclusive hardcover edition — or even getting to name a character in the final book.

Risukoauthor David Kudler invites you to participate in the fall 2016 edition of YASH, a scavenger hunt/blog hop across the websites of over a hundred terrific authors of young-adult books! Enter to free books, pick up lots of exclusive free content, and add some exciting new books to your to-be-read list!

Musings

This is the next in my on-going series of post on ebook creation; it focusses, obviously, on ebook conversion online. It was originally posted over at Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site for indie publishers, TheBookDesigner.com

The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online

Previously, I’ve compared some of the computer apps that you can use to convert your manuscript into an ebook.

This month I’ll talk about online conversion tools — all of the ones I’m going to discuss are attached to the retailers and distributors that you are going to be interested in.

Eye of the Hurricane: Top Ebook Retailers

Let’s start with the most popular retailers and their conversion tools (or lack thereof).

Once again, I’m assuming that you’re in the US — which isn’t a given, I know. (Most of this information is true for non-US publishers as well.) Also, I’m defining “manuscript” as synonymous with “Microsoft Word document” (either .doc or .docx), since that’s the most common file format for authors to work with, and that’s the format I used in comparing the desktop conversion tools.

As before, these are the major retailers you will probably be looking at:

I just had a conversation with a friend about the issue of piracy. I thought I’d share this post on the subject I wrote for Joel Friendlander’s TheBookDesigner.com:

I hear from a lot of authors — traditionally and self-published — who are panicked to find their work being stolen. “I just did a Google search,” they’ll moan, “and found a site that’s giving my book away!”

I take a deep breath, pour myself some (metaphoric) rum, and prepare to repel pirates — but mostly imagined ones.

Napster

It’s true: as long as there has been a commercial internet, there have been sites and apps that operated to “share” intellectual property illegally, to indulge in what is colorfully known as piracy.

Everyone remembers Napster: it was a peer-to-peer (P2P) app dedicated to sharing MP3 files across the internet back at the height of the so-called dot-com boom at the turn of the twenty-first century. The music industry did its best to shut Napster down by attacking its servers, its founder, and its users, and it did eventually force it out of business in 2001. But this didn’t stop P2P sharing; it simply moved the sharing on to other vectors — Limewire, BItTorrent, and many more.

However, a funny thing happened, also in 2001, that made music sharing less of an issue to the musicians and music companies: the launching of Apple’s iTunes (along with the iPod) made it easy actually to buy music through legitimate channels. Some folks still shared music online — but far more bought the music and downloaded it legitimately. iTunes became to music what Amazon has become for books: a way for even the smallest label to reach an audience and make some money. In some cases a lot of money.

Like this:

This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about ebook creation. Like the others, it was originally posted on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful resource for indie publishers,TheBookDesigner.com

The Ebook Retail Universe

I realized after my last post (looking at ebook conversion tools) that in my excitement in finally getting to the nuts and bolts of ebook creation that I’d skipped over online conversion tools. Most of those tools either are directly attached to ebook retailer websites or are attached indirectly through distributors/aggregators. So I’m going to have to backtrack.

This month I’ll talk about the retailers and distributors that you are going to be interested in, and next month I’m going to talk about the conversion tools that they offer.

Like this:

What Can Stillpoint Do for You?

Stillpoint Digital Press is a publisher and publishing services provider that creates fine ebook, audiobook, and print editions in genres from fiction to literary nonfiction, from memoir to poetry. It aims to provide digital publishing with a human face, offering a full range of editorial services, from editing, layout and ebook conversion to distribution and marketing.